Limitless Worlds

Thursday, July 2, 2015

Here is a little thought I had about a potential source of antagonists in Miami 2085, the Five-O. This is in no way final, but I just thought it would be a good idea.

The Five-O

Despite the vastness of the Miami Police Department, they can not always handle every case thrown at them. When dealing with hypercoke gang wars, raiders from Back Westracial struggles between the droids and humans, they may need to bring in the big guns.

Those are the Five-O.

The Five-O has mass produced robotic police officers, put out by Antagonism Solutions Unlimited. They more often than not look like your average policeman, but get closer and you can see the rubbery flesh, the oddly angled jawline, and the cold eyes that are constantly scanning the crowd.

Due to their quick production and need to be mass-produced, their programming is quite lacking. One of the most easily noticeable quirks is their speech patterns; full of tonal fluctuations, stutters, and loops, they sound more like a scratched vinyl or a overheated voice processor than a robot.

Another glitch, but more often played off as a feature, is their primitive emotion matrix. No matter the mood or even, a Five-O always comes off as a cheerful and helpful civil servant. They will calmly request you return to your apartment as they are chasing you down the alley with guns drawn. They also tend to be cold, calculating, and cruel, which is even more disturbing when they constantly wear a shit-eating grin.

Make no mistake, do not take the Five-O lightly. They are often bristling with chrome and munitions all hidden within their bodies, and if you see a few guarding a building or a city street, you know something big is going down.

Five-O are very rarely ordered to arrest anyone; they either deter, threaten, or kill. If you have to fight one, or god forbid multiple, make sure you have a listed next-of-kin.

So yeah, they Five-O are basically Robocop mixed with Max Headroom, which is both hilarious and terrifying to me.

Modern pop culture is entering a very weird point. If you look back over the 20th century, there was a kind of general progression in, if not an upwards fashion at least, of American popular culture.

But I've come to notice lately a backwards slip into the 80s. With proliferation of chillwave, explosive action movies, bright colored clothes (saw a kid with bright-blue acid-washed shorts the other day), and a resurgence in progressive social movements, it's both a return of and criticism of the 80s.

Another strange part of the 80s was the idea of cyberpunk, though the execution was poor and never realized. And in a way, the cyberpunk aesthetic is a little TOO grimy. It's nearly noir, and extremely pessimistic, and only located on certain sub-cultures like early punk and post-mob drug dealers.

So that's where I am thinking about working on a setting I'm calling "Miami 2085". It's not about the 80s that people were experiencing, or the 80s that people wanted, but the pop 80s that happened.

You may notice in the headline I mention 'trash culture', and you probably wonder what that is. Trash culture is my self-coined term that revolves around looking back on the overly saturated, decade defining cultural memes and playing up their ridiculousness. This setting isn't about the Sex Pistols, Reganomics or post-Veitnam rights movements; this setting is about cocaine, white leisure suits, Top Gun, Naked Eyes, Tears for Fears, enormous cellphones, pastel colors and Ferraris. Miami 2085 is just as influenced by American Psycho and Com Truise as it is by Back to the Future and Drive.

This is all just ideas at this point, and I have no idea what system it'd use (or if it'd just be generic), but it has promise, I feel. Check here for more